Playing a poor photographer in this 1953 film, Cantinflas is captured by gangsters while trying to steal flowers for his girlfriend. It seems that the hoods have mistaken him for the assistant to a brilliant physicist who has discovered a formula for a new atomic bomb. So of course, Cantinflas manages to convince them that the rubber ball he is holding is in fact this new bomb. Hailed by Charlie Chaplin as "the greatest comedian in the world," Fortino Mario Alfonso Moreno Reyes—known to millions by his character name "Cantinflas"—was compared to Chaplin and also to Groucho Marx for his use of satire and trickery to undercut the pompous and aristocratic. Though his brilliant Spanish wordplay limited his success in English-speaking countries, Cantinflas was a modern folk hero in Mexico, and his death in 1993 was followed by three days of national mourning. This Spanish-language film is subtitled in English.